I'm trying to run an 8400 GS on a Via C3 processor. Unfortunately, this "i686-like" processor lacks the cmov instruction. My X server dies during startup with an illegal instruction. I suspect the nVidia driver does some OpenGL init during load and that's where it tries to run a cmov.

[edit: This crash happened in the driver proper: nvdia_drv.so. I could probably hand-patch these to NOPs, but if someone would be nice enough to make an official build, that'd be great. Thaaaanks. </lumberg>]

Unfortunately, current NVIDIA FreeBSD graphics drivers are written for and intended to be run on modern x86 processors. They rely on features like SSE, and expect instructions such as cmov and sfence to be supported. The older legacy graphics drivers are less demanding (for example, we made sure 173.xx runs on CPUs that do not support SSE).